I Am Fine — I Am Not Fine

How survival taught me to stop performing the period and start living in the em dash

I refuse to live in a world where clarity is suspicious, where emotional precision gets flagged as fake, and where using an em dash now apparently means you’re a bot.

Once upon a time, the em dash was just punctuation — a pause or a pivot mid-sentence, a way to interrupt yourself on purpose when a comma felt too weak and a period felt like slamming a door on your thought. It held tension without resolving it. It let two ideas exist on the same line—unfinished, alive, honest. Using it meant you valued nuance and cadence. It hinted at a mind that doesn’t move in straight lines, but also doesn’t fall apart. Now it’s a tell.

I’d been living with my own kind of tell for years. Not the grammatical kind. The bodily kind. I felt everything and nothing at the same time. Numb to the things that should have mattered. Overwhelmed by things that shouldn’t. A text from a friend asking how I was doing? It landed like a demand I couldn’t meet. But I could plan a birthday party, manage a work crisis, coordinate three people’s schedules, and make it look effortless.

I was out of control in the cycling. Between numbness and overwhelm, with no map, no language, no understanding. Sometimes the shift happened in minutes — fine one moment, underwater the next. Sometimes it took months to move from one state to another. Just the feeling that I was supposed to land somewhere. That I’d eventually arrive at the moment when I could put a period on it.

Everyone kept waiting for me to do exactly that. To be done. To say “I’m fine” and mean it. Period. End of story. The healed version. The put-together woman.

That’s what we’re taught to aim for. The period. The clean ending. The moment when the mess gets tidied up, and you can finally present a coherent self to the world. We’re taught that if you just do enough therapy, enough journaling, enough self-work, you’ll eventually arrive at the place where you can say “I’m okay” and put a period on it. Where the movement stops. Where you become one coherent self, making sense from every angle.

The em dash is literally the only punctuation mark we have that refuses to do that. It doesn’t resolve tension like a period. It doesn’t smooth things over. The em dash holds two truths in the same breath and says: both of these are real. I’m not going to collapse them for your comfort.

The period says: this is finished. The em dash says: this is ongoing.

When you’ve been in survival mode that long, there is no period, there’s no moment where it’s just over. The world keeps insisting you should be able to put a period on it — “I survived.” Period. “I’m better now.” Period. But the truth is in the em dash. “I survived — I’m still surviving.” “I’m better — I’m also still broken.”

I’d been performing that period for so long, I wasn’t sure what was underneath anymore. Not dramatically. There was no breakdown. I still showed up. I still functioned. From the outside, it looked like I’d put a period on it. Like I was fine.

But the gap was widening. The distance between the woman I presented — the one who’d got it together, who’d moved on, who’d healed — and the woman I actually was — the one who felt nothing most of the time and too much the rest of the time.

And that’s when it happened for me. Not a breakdown. Not a revelation. Just a small recognition. A flicker. An ember. A small heat in the center of the numbness. A recognition that something in me was still alive even when most of me felt dead. A refusal to keep pretending that the version I’d been showing — the one with the period — was the only version that existed.

The ember is what happens when you stop performing the period and start naming what’s real. Even when what’s real is: I don’t know. I’m both. I’m neither. I’m somewhere in between, and I don’t have a word for it yet, except the em dash.

That’s the real tell. Not the em dash. The fact that we can’t recognize truth when it’s staring us in the face. The fact that, when “fine” became the only option, “fine” became the performance, and the performance became so convincing that even I started to believe it.

So here we are, living in a timeline where emotional stability is “sus,” self-awareness is “too polished,” and the safest way to sound human is to flatten your language and lower the bar.

The em dash didn’t fail us. It was framed.

I get it, we’re jumpy. The bots are coming for jobs, for art, for authenticity itself. Of course, we’re hunting for tells. But we’ve overcorrected so hard that the ability to hold complexity — the thing that makes us most human — now reads as artificial.

Drop an em dash into a sentence and suddenly people squint like, “Interesting tone. How very… trained… of you.” Journalists have used it forever. Essayists love it. Hell, Emily Dickinson used it — and she was writing in a corset with a quill, not training a large language model in a server farm.

And the part that makes me laugh, AI can mirror authority — and proper writing — because it was trained on work produced by people who knew how to hold tension without collapsing. People who understood that life exists in duality. That clarity doesn’t mean completion. That you can be here and still becoming.

We taught machines to write well by feeding them our most honest work. Work that didn’t flatten the paradox. Work that held both. And now we punish ourselves for that same complexity because machines learned to mimic the version of us that refused to perform for either side.

But now shifting between states is treated like a problem to solve. Like a temporary condition you move through on your way to the period. But this is the condition. You are allowed to grieve what you don’t want back. You are allowed to feel relief and loss at the same time. You are allowed to be strong and numb — and that’s not failure, that’s what survival actually looks like when it’s been your baseline for years.

The em dash doesn’t apologize for that. It just holds it. The period demands resolution. The em dash allows reality.

The ember doesn’t resolve anything. It lives inside the tension. And the ember is what happens when you stop treating the movement as something to fix. When you stop reaching for the period. When you finally let both truths exist in the same breath and say: this is real. All of it.

The ember is in the tension. In the gap between what you’ve been showing and what you’ve been feeling. In the space where you stop pretending the cycling is a problem and start recognizing it as the condition you’ve been living inside all along. The ember is in the em dash.

Now I understand: cycling through these states IS control. It’s not being out of control — it’s the most control I can have. It’s working with my body, not fighting it. I’m not performing anymore. I’m comfortable living solidly in both worlds. The numbness comes, and I know it’s my nervous system doing what it was designed to do. The overwhelm arrives, and I recognize it as information, not failure. I move between them — sometimes in a month, sometimes in a year, sometimes in mere minutes — and instead of treating that movement as evidence that I’m broken, I see it for what it is. My body’s way of surviving. The most human response possible.

The difference is I have language for it now. A map. And the em dash — that supposedly fake punctuation mark — it’s part of that language. I know what I’m looking at when the numbness arrives alongside the hyperfunction. I can name the gap instead of just inhabiting it. I can write the sentence: I am completely functional — I am barely holding on. And let both truths exist in the same breath without forcing them to reconcile. That naming, that refusal to collapse the contradiction — that’s where the paradox stops working against me and starts becoming something I can actually use.

The em dash is under suspicion because we’ve forgotten what honesty looks like. We’ve spent so long performing the period — so long pretending that we’re supposed to make sense, that our lives are supposed to fit together neatly — that when we finally see a structure that refuses to collapse the contradiction, we call it fake.

But the em dash is the realest thing we have.

The goal isn’t to finally arrive at the period. The goal is to learn to live within the duality of the em dash and use it to grow and become more effective. To recognize that being strong and numb at the same time isn’t a failure to heal — it’s what survival looks like when it’s been your baseline for years. To stop treating the em dash like it’s fake or broken. To start recognizing it as the most honest way to live when you’ve been in survival mode.

The ember doesn’t promise that anything will resolve. It doesn’t promise you’ll ever get to your period. It just promises that you don’t have to keep pretending it isn’t there. And that’s where the flame starts. Not in the resolution. Not in the period. In the tension. In the gap. In the em dash.

The period says: I’m fine. End of story.

The em dash says: I’m fine — I’m not fine. Both are true. And that’s not fake. That’s the realest thing in the world.

The em dash holds two truths at once. So do I —